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‘Credit to Fathead’s PR team’ in product mix-up

From the world of Reddit, we’ve seen how social monitoring can lead to a PR win for a brand.

For NFL fans, you can’t name two more dissimilar quarterbacks than New England Patriot Tom Brady and free agent Tim Tebow. Brady was a mediocre college player turned three-time Super Bowl champion—arguably the face of the league. Tebow was a college star who has yet to make his mark in his brief, yet polarizing, NFL career.

A lot of people—especially in the Boston area—love Brady. Many of them passionately dislike Tebow (and the New York Jets).

So it’s understandable why someone would be upset if they ordered a Tom Brady Fathead—for the uninitiated, it’s a giant, removable wall poster bearing a player’s likeness—and instead received one depicting Tebow wearing a Jets uniform.

In the comments section of the follow-up post, the original user questioned Fathead’s intentions:

“…it's incredibly nice of them to send me all of this, but I also kinda have that feeling that I was just bought off for good publicity, as I feel karmically (not the reddit kind) bound to share this after starting such a huge PR cluster**ck for them.”

Fathead made light of the situation with this tweet, linking to a CBS Sports story:

How does a @patriots fan get all 13 Tom Brady Fatheads from us? Order a Brady Teammate & receive Tebow instead. #OOPSow.ly/lJI2z

It clearly raises questions for PR pros: When your company messes up like this, is it done with the expectation that the person who was wronged will re-post the make-good in their social channels? What percentage of Fathead’s response came because the fan’s outrage went viral?

If it had been a consumer complaint through their usual email or hotline channels, would the person have gotten such generous atonement? My guess is probably not.